Silent Hill: The Devil Within
by Twistedmaniac
Summary: Three friends, who may or may not be considered total wackjobs, set off for a road trip during a rare bout of normalcy. Unfortunately, they let the craziest one drive and subsequently wind up in Silent Hill, wherein their various issues manifest.
1. Chapter 1: Into the Abyss

Disclaimer: Do not own Silent Hill. Would love to. Do not. Am not making money off of this. The song lyrics used are from the soundtrack of Silent Hill 3.

Explanation: (You can skip this and go to the story, especially if you know what a multiple is.)

25 pages into this, my best friend and co-writer convinced me that more than just the two of us could see this and possibly like it. I hope so. I wrote it for us, but if more people like it, then that's fantastic. *worries that it will be weird/terrible/disastrous* First off, a definition: a multiple is someone who has—surprise—multiple personalities. Formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder, it is now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder. And yes, I really do have it. If you wish to seek out more information, I encourage you to do so. If you wish to read good books on the subject, I recommend "When Rabbit Howls", "First Personal Plural", and the graphic novel "Cuckoo". Moving on. So you know, Boyfriend, whose name is changed to respect his dignity at being included in a fanfiction (sorry…) really is that awesome. He really does have those blades. And he is that good with them. Best Friend really is that awesome, too. Also that crazy. As am I. (Best Friend would like to point out that being psychotic is not as fun as you might think. I second this wholeheartedly). And those are not what-if personalities. Several days ago, the evil one was out. Fun for everyone. As revenge, he has been put into fanfiction. Take that, asshole. Also, this is not me being like, omg, if Boyfriend, Best Friend and I went to Silent Hill, what if—oh no. This is pretty much exactly how it would go. A depressing amount of thought has gone into it, including our psychological issues as manifested as monsters, our individual characters and speech patterns, and the things we do in fact carry on our person. Best Friend really does carry spoons (uses them to whack hallucinations. You WISH you knew someone this awesome.) I really do carry knives. Boyfriend really does carry swords. Questions, comments, flames, all welcome!

Sometimes it doesn't matter where you're trying to go. Sometimes a place along the way, or a place a world away, decides that you're not going anywhere until it's done with you. Sometimes a demon hijacks your body and decides to drive you into an abandoned town with ever-burning coal fires. Sometimes friends should really know not to let a multiple navigate the annual road trip.

I'm not calling this my fault. At least, not initially. After all, I was used to the dreams.

The night before we left, I saw him in the distance. Fog wreathed the trees, winter trees, black trees, reaching in stark contrast to the whiteness enveloping the world. Fog, darkness, it didn't matter. I would recognize him in any dream, in any reality, senseless. A child stood by his side, distant. It wasn't Lena, which was odd, because they were nearly inseparable.

I would ask him, then. I made my way through the pavement, faded and overgrown with weeds. Desert-like fauna twisting its way through cracks and grabbing at my ankles. It made for slow going, but I was desperate to reach them. I stumbled my way through, feet burning. Burning? I looked down. Around my bare feet, smoke curled up from somewhere far beneath the surface. I began to run; the plants snagging my toes, ensnaring my heels. I wasn't getting any closer. I could never avoid the plants. The fog hid them until it was too late. Inevitably, I fell. The ground shuddered beneath me. When I looked up, the fog was beginning to recede, revealing several more. Then several more, then more, until there was an army of misshapen, hunching figures, all looking at me. All perfectly still. There was no reason to fear them. They weren't advancing. They didn't seem to have any desire to use the crowbars, the planks, the chainsaws in their hands. I opened my mouth, paralyzed with terror, and all that I could manage was a faint hissing noise, even though my vocal chords strained with the effort to scream. They stood. They watched me scream.

I woke up.

At first I saw fog. I saw hordes of deformed, silent people listening to me hiss and breathe in all my desperate attempts to scream some sort of warning to the world.

The scream worked here. Here in my bed with my best friend who sat up almost as quickly as I did. I tore off the covers, scrambling to get out of bed, and stood poised, ready to run, ready to hurt things. Wide eyes stared back at me, the grayish-green of the girl I'd met eight long years ago. We were silent; two frightened creatures somewhere between predator and prey, ready to attack or run if threatened.

"Sorry," I breathed. My voice was hoarse, and not from sleep.

"Oh, sweetie," she said, lifting back the covers and padding over to me on bare feet. "What happened?"

"Nightmare" seemed self-explanatory. "I don't know" was true, but unhelpful. But after a night terror, it was the best I could do.

"I don't know. Nightmare," I said, still breathing hard. My heart beat like it was trying to get free of my ribcage. "Night terror," I added after a moment.

"Do you want a hug?"

"No," I said. "Nope." The terror still clouded me, but embarrassment was beginning to break through. I was hoping the rest of the house hadn't heard me. I paused. "What time is it?"

She checked the clock, glowing in the semi-darkness. Damnit, darkness. My heart sunk. Darkness meant I would have to try and sleep again. Darkness meant more medication, more attempts to sleep, eyes wide open.

"It's 4:30 in the morning, love," she said, almost apologetically.

"Shit."

We were quiet for a moment. I didn't want to go back to bed, and she knew it. I doubted either of us could after that. But neither of us said this out loud.

"Come on," she said gently, returning to the large bed and holding out a hand. I took it and climbed back over the rumpled comforter. I wanted to pull the blankets so that they covered every inch of me, hid every inch of me. But with cold hands and a heated body, that wasn't going to be comfortable. Fuck it. Comforters make me feel safe. Illogical, but true. I pulled them up to my neck—Maggie mimicked me on the other side, so that we faced each other like two children waiting for the sun to rise.

"So. Tell me about your dream."

I was quiet for a moment. "Didn't really make a lot of sense."

"Well, it's a dream. It doesn't have to, love bug."

I tried, but I had no real desire to explain this one. I rarely did. It was too new. Too much a part of me. Too weird.

The good thing about Maggie and I is that we rarely experience any kind of failure to communicate. I don't know why. Maybe we understand each other. Maybe we've experienced similar realities.

Softly, she began to sing. Ever since I've known her, Maggie has sung in the car, on the sidewalk, in the stores, in the house. A clear, sweet voice. "_The wind…howling at the window—the love, you never gave, I give to you—really don't deserve it. But now…there's nothing you can do. So sleep, in your only memory of me—My. Dearest. Mother. Here's a lullaby to close your eyes…goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye." _

Through half-closed eyes, I whispered, "Why did you choose that song, Maggie?"

She paused. She often paused, in no particular hurry to rush whatever went drifting through her mind. "I don't know."

"We're going on a trip," I whispered, after a moment. Most things should be whispered at 4:30 in the morning.

"Perhaps we'll leave our dreams behind," she said, in that far-off manner she sometimes has. I don't think it's the psychosis. I think it's Maggie.

"We?"

"I've been having some curious dreams myself," she confessed.

"What about?"

"Oh…you know," she said dismissively.

We lay there for some time, thinking. She hummed quietly to herself, tracing patterns with her fingers on the comforter, drawn so close to both of us.

It wasn't yet late enough in the spring that the sun would be rising soon. There was still that quiet, soft darkness when we made the mutual decision to get up. The stars were still there, faint, dimmed by the paleness of the horizon. We did everything in quiet accordance with this light, the rich smell of freshly ground coffee filling the kitchen. I made a somewhat successful attempt at cooking pancakes. They were lumpy, yes, but the recipe (from Maggie's mother) was hard to ruin. Even I had trouble doing that.

We brought the food back into her bed, turning on the light, with only the sound of a fan whirring softly. Bea, a lovely, if somewhat dense cat, made a leap for the bed, dragging her weight up by her claws. Maggie picked her up and flipped her upside-down, holding her in her lap and stroking her head as she ate. Contented cat noises filled the silence.

"Maybe we should just leave early," I suggested, when we'd gathered our bags, fully dressed and awake. The sun still hadn't risen.

"Ian…might be awake," Maggie conceded. "But you get to call him."

"You call him," I muttered, tying my boots. I hate phones. I hate bothering people more.

"He's _your _boyfriend. He can kill _you _if we wake him up."

"Maybe we should wait."

She'd been dialing his number—she held the phone to my ear. I glared at her, the dial tone loud in the silence. It ended abruptly. A rough voice answered. "Yeah."

"Oh. Hi. We're up early," I said, because I am excellent at relaying obvious information. "We were just wondering if you wanted to start the trip early."

Silence. "Yeah, okay."

"Did I wake you up?"

"No, I've actually been up for a little while. Give me...say, ten minutes and I'll be over."

"Cool. See you then."

"Bye."

My favourite phone conversations last for less than fifteen seconds.

"Yay, we're going on a trip," I said, still trying to shake off something, probably the dream, and get in an appropriately excited mood.

"Yay!" Maggie said. "We're going nowhere!"

"Yay!"

And it began as simply as that. See, we live in New England, rural New England, and with the exception of Ian, we don't travel much. (He can only stay in our state for so long before he winds up half way across the world.) Finally, we'd found a time when we could all run away. We had a few weeks—enough time to take a proper tour of the States. I wanted to see what Ian did in the South; Maggie felt an inexplicable call to Pennsylvania. Ian had been in one place for too long. Simple at that. I was taking advantage of my own momentary sanity to do something enjoyable for once. When you're crazy, you have to do that. Yes, I'd been having some weird nightmares lately, even for me, but bizarre dreams didn't count as insanity. I'd had enough of those by this point that they were a natural part of the sleep process. The nightmares, the night terrors—just dreams. Fine, so the sleepwalking was new. The part where I wake screaming wasn't.

But it was early morning now, and the dreams were beginning to fade from my mind. It started off clear and only got brighter, even as we drove in the opposite direction of the rising sun. I hate sunrises. They inevitably mean that I haven't slept nearly as much as I should, or often that I haven't slept at all. Least, that's what I tell myself when I'm not seeing one. Once I catch a glimpse of the bloody coin rising, shining in the east, casting the tops of the trees golden and gory, I change my opinion of them.

We all started off somewhat muted, as though none of us wanted to speak too loudly or say too much. The kind of mood most people adopt in the drizzling, freezing rain. We brightened as the sun died, however. Conversations started, maps were opened, fast food was eaten. A trip mentality set in. Coffee helped. Maybe it's because we're all somewhat nocturnal. Practically speaking, as bipolar people, our serotonin levels rise at night. Something like that. Also why we tend to get manic at night. This is Maggie and I—bipolar with psychotic features and I'm a multiple to boot. Crazy people seek each other out. Don't know what happened with Ian. He has…Ian-ness. Oh, he isn't normal by any stretch of the imagination, but he's depressingly sane. Yet somehow, we get along.

Perhaps it felt like a long time, perhaps it felt like nothing at all, but the sun began to set, until we were driving into its violent rays. I had to hold up an arm in the passenger's seat; Ian managed to drive half-blind. We switched off at the next stop so he could have a break and I could take the night shift. Maggie and a host of Irish music served as sufficient background. Somewhere around midnight, though, this too died out. Silence overtook the car. Maggie stared out the window, in her own trance, as Ian slept, willing to drive in the morning. I wasn't about to see the sun again for a long time to come. I was going to attempt sleep once my natural energy ran out—around 5 or 6 in the morning. The map lay unfolded, creased in Maggie's lap.

After a while, I began to feel as though I knew the way. This should have been the first, if not the third tip that something was about to go terribly wrong. I never know where I'm going. I get lost on the way to my classes, much less to a state I've never been to. Maggie must have felt something similar because the map was simply ignored. The competent sane person was asleep. Perhaps he felt the same way, though, to trust us to go the right way. In fact, that too was strange. He knew we'd never been along this way and he rarely needed to sleep, in any case. If this had been even a semi-normal trip, he would have stayed awake to make sure that we knew the way. And I would have been alarmed that I felt I knew where I was going.

That my hands just seemed to glide across the steering wheel, long-fingered hands, pale hands that made even the most mundane action graceful, controlled. I thought I was smiling. I had no mirror to tell me that it was more of a smirk, flashing incisors and some trick of the light that made my eyes look silver. It was too subtle, even for someone who knows the signs all too well. A person who never knew where she was going.

But someone else did.

The trees were not yet green here, black winter trees with dry dead branches. A month later, this place would be bursting with life. Darkness would fall on greenery, rain would fall on thick leaves, and all to the melody of minute frogs.

But not yet. The chill of winter may have faded, but it had given way to air thick with moisture, heavy on the skin and almost too thick to breathe. There was a light fog here, snaking along the black road. No sound but the quiet roar of tires on pavement.

My hand snaked out, animating the radio. I hated the radio. But I had turned the radio on all the same; probably looking for something to fill the silence.

I liked silence.

I frowned, and the muscles in my face wouldn't comply. That would have made me frown harder, except that they still didn't seem to be connected to my intentions. Fact was, I felt rather far away. Shoved to the side, if you will. Diminished by sleep deprivation and too much driving, most likely. I needed to eat something, but there hadn't been any buildings for a long time now. My eyes flicked to the side of the road, presumably searching for some sign that would point me toward the nearest imitation-food stop. They found nothing. Nothing but road and trees.

The radio popped and snapped at me, crackling out something that was a far cry from music. Static. My hand changed the stations, flipping through them like pages. Static. Lower static. Higher-pitched static. All static, until it emitted a piercing sound that cut straight through my skull. Desperately, I tried to turn it off, but all my hand would do was rest on the steering wheel. My body relaxed, my mind screaming for the noise to stop.

Eyes flicked up the road just in time. An animal crawled across it, limbs all wrong. Dragging itself by its curled hands, it turned its neck to look up at me and the hair was wrong, too. A child. I tried to swerve, I tried to locate the muscles that made my arms work, but nothing did—a moment of blackness, a voice, and then a flash of reality, a fence of interlinked metal suddenly much closer than it should have been, and we collided with a crash of metal on metal, screaming metal that whined and broke in protest. My body didn't touch anything for a moment, until the seatbelt snapped into place, and my neck snapped with it, smashing my forehead into the steering wheel. A voice, or nothing at all.

More silence.

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	2. Chapter 2: So it Goes

Chapter 2:

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

* * *

Brightness gave way to a new kind of quiet. The muted nothing that comes with snowfall. I opened my eyes.

The side of my face rested against the steering wheel. Something slid down my forehead and into my eyes, blurring my vision red. I raised a hand to wipe it away. Too slowly. Like waking up on too much medicine, too much sleep. I couldn't feel my body for a moment. Disconnected limbs and functions.

I turned my head to the side and saw a spider-web of a cracked window. Wrong side. Turned the other way. Maggie. Oh. Maggie. Not good. Please let her be alright. I kept trying to say her name and my lips were heavy, dream-like in their uselessness.

She cracked an eye open at me and did exactly what I had tried—moving far too quickly, too soon.

"Ashlyn," she said. She rarely used my full name—it was always Ash, Little Lyn, Ashie…a host of names that would get anyone else killed. Coming from her, I never minded.

"Don't," I said, voice awkward. Once I was thrown from a horse. It was windy and a leaf, or maybe a wrapper, frightened it. It bucked, galloped, until I was vertical. I held on the first time, but on the second buck I sailed through the air, and all the way down. I jumped up right away and the instructor pushed me back down, insisting that she had to check for broken bones.

I tried to relay this to Maggie.

"Don't move too quick."

"I'm alright," she said, convincing both of us, or trying to. She straightened, wincing. "What happened? Are you okay?"

"Where's Ian?" I asked, as my mind rushed back to me with terrifying clarity. Suddenly I could move, think, panic with frightening calm. He wasn't in the back seat. His seatbelt was unbuckled. There was no blood. His window wasn't broken. He'd left.

I rushed to unbuckle myself, throwing open the door. It was snowing here. Snowing perfect, grayish clusters of snowflakes. It smelled of cigarettes. No, not cigarettes—fire. A snowflake landed on the back of my hand. To my surprise, it didn't melt. It simply rested until I smudged it to a streak of gray.

"Ash," I whispered.

Maggie had joined me.

"It's raining ash."

"We have to find Ian," she said. There was a note of desperation in her voice, masked by practicality. In another context, she might have remarked that it was raining me. "Ash, we have to find Ian."

"Where is this?" The chain link fence continued to the side of us, fencing off what appeared to be a junkyard. Rusted old cars, bed frames of old metal, once ornate, rested in a graveyard of metal and waste. I couldn't see the fence we'd crashed through. The road looked subtly different. Had we somehow come that far? It was grayer here, cracked and crumbled in some places. A thick fog shrouded the area directly behind us. I couldn't see more than a dozen or so feet ahead of me.

"Hell," I said softly.

"Come on," she said, still in shock. She grabbed my hand and we began to run.

There wasn't much I could do for them. It might be more serious to move them than to try and wake them and check for injuries. I checked their pulses, listened to their breathing, and they sounded okay. Next priority was finding out where the Hell we were.

I didn't even know how we'd gotten here. I woke up when we crashed and I have no idea why we crashed. I didn't even know what state we were in. This was one of those rare cases where I could actually make use of my cell phone. I tried the police first, but all I got was static. I thought that might have been my phone, at first, having used it with considerable disregard in the past (i.e. as body armor). I tried Ash's, to the same end. I tried a friend next, pacing at this point. I thought I heard someone pick up.

"Hi, Kevin, this is Ian. Listen, I just got in a car accident. The lines are down here and...hello?—"

Crackling. A slight improvement on static, but really not that much better. I waited for a moment more, at which point the phone began to really scream at me. I may not have known where we were, but we had to be pretty far out to get that kind of screeching.

I decided to wind my way back a little, try and see if anyone else had been hurt in the accident. Maybe I'd find out what route we're on.

Or maybe I'd find that the road dropped off into nothing.

It crumbled off into a cliff-side, apparently bottomless and so covered with fog that I couldn't see beyond the drop or to the other side. If it had one. One moment road. Next step, air. It was a damn good thing I hadn't been running.

_Huh, _I thought.

In my experience, roads usually stayed roads. At least in the U.S. We should have been on a major highway to get here. Or at least some sort of developed road. This didn't add up at all.

There wasn't really anything I could do about it, though, so I headed back to the car. They were still passed out. Nothing I could do about that either. I didn't really feel like contracting tetanus, so the junkyard was out.

On a general feeling, or maybe out of habit, I retrieved a tire iron from the car. There were plenty of knives on my person, but right now I wanted something bigger.

I wandered up ahead, where I finally found something I could use. A large sign announcing the state—no, the town we were in. This fog was really intent on making this difficult.

Welcome to Silent Hill

Silent Hill isn't really a name you hear a lot.

Silent Hill...Silent Hill.

Ah.

That would explain the ash.

Might even explain the lack of road. Would not, however, explain how we got here. This isn't the greatest state, but generally speaking, it does have functional roads. Especially highways. And we had to get here somehow.

I was still staring at the sign when I heard the muted sound of a car door shutting. I wanted to turn around, but couldn't seem to take my eyes from the words. And while I looked on, everything I had read of this place ran through my head.

I couldn't help but feel I was missing pieces.

We had barely gone a dozen steps before a hazy figure was revealed through the fog. The height and the hat made it Ian. A fedora, and not the sort used by artsy, willowy boys in thick-framed glasses. It was a hat that one of his relatives had once worn escaping the Nazis when they invaded Norway. He was reading off of some large sign, perfectly still. I knew it was him, but for a moment, it was like those nightmares where until the last moment, you thought it was the person you knew. And the moment they turned around, a monster.

I stopped short with this feeling all through my body and said hesitantly, "Ian?"

He still didn't turn around. There was a tire iron in his hand.

"Hey," I said, before I had any idea what I was going to say. "Are you alright?"

Finally, his neck wrenched his head from the sign and turned him to look at us. The rest of his body followed. He nodded, checking both me and Maggie over. First things first, then; we assessed the damage. I'd knocked my head pretty hard, but if it was a concussion, it was an extremely minor one. I remembered crashing. I knew the president and the date it had been when we left, not that it helped us any now. Maggie had sustained some bad bruising, but it was nothing that wouldn't heal unaided. Ian alone was completely unharmed.

" 'Silent Hill'. Do you know where this is, Ian?"

"Yeah," he said carefully. "And it isn't exactly where we meant to turn up. What road were you taking before we crashed?"

I opened my mouth to name it and found that there was nothing. I didn't know.

"We're not in the right area. We're not even in the right state." He said.

"I was following..." I trailed off. The route we had been meant to take was carefully inked in black. A child could have followed it. I _had _been following it. I remembered holding it in my hands. But it was barely dark then. There had been seven hours or more since then. I needed to have recollections from that time period and I very simply didn't.

"I am NEVER letting you drive again." Ian said flatly.

"No, I was! I'm not that—"

The amusement on their faces defeated me mid-sentence.

I might lose my keys multiple times each day. I might space out, forget my address, and walk out the door without pants, but damnit, I could follow a map that someone had pre-outlined for me. He had carefully explained the names of the major routes, the landmarks, the distance, the time it would take. I wasn't _that _incompetent. Was I?

"I had the map," I said, face flushed. I rarely blushed, but I hated it when I did. "I was following it."

"And Maggie was helping you, right?" he said, raising his eyebrows at us.

"I fell asleep," Maggie said, bowing her head. "Sorry..."

He paused for a moment, showing admirable restraint in not cursing us out. "So we're in the wrong state. Fine. Do you at least know how we crashed?"

"Yeah," I said. I was glad to switch to a topic that hadn't really been my fault. "The fog was really thick. Out of nowhere, there was a fence."

"In the middle of the road?"

"Yes. I swear, there was nothing to indicate that a fence should be there."

"That's not possible."

There was something in his voice that was flatter than doubt.

"Why? What is it?" I glanced behind us almost automatically, even though I knew the fence would be covered by this damn fog. We could hardly see in any direction. What was more, it appeared to dull any sound. I could hear neither people nor cars—and the moment I realized that, I became even more confused. Hell, we were in the middle of a road. A shitty, decrepit road, but a road nonetheless. This was not like the roads in our rural to semi-rural hometowns. I'd been on a major highway when last I looked. And there was not a single car.

Without a word, Ian led us back toward the scene of the accident. Which reminded me.

"Ian, have you looked around? Do you know if anyone else was hurt? Shit, we need to move the car. Someone's going to crash into it in this fog."

I'd already taken care of the fence for them.

"That's not really something you need to worry about," he said. He took us past the car, back where we'd come from. A few paces on he stopped. We kept going, and he physically blocked our way. This annoyed me until I saw the reason why he'd stopped in the first place.

Where there should have been a road, there was air. It was sheer, crumbled cliff-side, as though an already aging road had caved in centuries ago. Several steps more and we would have fallen into the chasm.

"Ye gods," Maggie said.

Light headed, I stepped back. Heights. I was not friendly with them. If I had seen this, I would have gone out of my way to avoid it. I would have turned around, all the way back to our home state. I would have stopped. Anything but gotten past it—that was physically impossible.

"Honestly, I haven't figured this one out yet," Ian admitted.

"No—there was a fence..." I trailed off again. I'd crashed because of it. That was the whole reason we were out here. Just a fence. Not a freaking cliff-side.

"There's only one fence, and it leads to an old junkyard," Ian said.

"Yeah, I saw it. But Ian, I swear, that's the reason we crashed."

"Have you seen the front of the car?"

"No."

"It's completely unharmed. If you had crashed through a fence, there would be damage."

"Maggie, you saw it. I crashed through a fence," I said, voice rising slightly. And all I could see was air. Air and cliff and crumbled, decaying roadside. There was nothing this way. Nowhere to go. And not one fence.

"Yes..." she said, but her voice was uncertain. "I did think that was what happened. Maybe we both hit our heads, Lynnie."

I shook my head. I was not going to question our sanity right now. I was going to pretend we had Things We Needed to Do that Were More Immediately Important.

"Ian, have you been into the town yet?"

"No," he said, and again there was something in his voice that gave me pause.

"Where are we, Ian?" I asked calmly. Both Maggie and I turned to look at him.

"Silent Hill," he said. "It's an abandoned mining town."

"Abandoned?" I echoed.

"There's no one here?" Maggie asked.

"No," he said. "They had to evacuate years ago. It used to be a big coal mining town in the 50's. Until the fire, anyway."

"Fire?" Maggie questioned. The cliff-side was momentarily forgotten for her—a history lesson could always ensure her full attention.

"Yeah. No one knows exactly how it started, but with the amount of coal below our feet, it could conceivably still be burning once people are off the face of the planet. The politicians were furious, of course...anthracite coal...really valuable stuff."

"And it's completely devoid of people," I said.

"Oh, yeah. Not everyone wanted to leave, but every now and then holes to the Hell below open up out of nowhere. The fumes alone—in fact, we need to get of here as soon as possible. And until we do, we should be breathing through face masks. Clothes are better than nothing, though." He lifted the material of his shirt to cover his mouth and we followed suit.

"But it would make sense that the road hasn't been properly maintained," Maggie said, almost hopefully.

"Yes. But not destroyed. In fact, it would make no sense for them to willingly destroy a road that no one uses anyway." He frowned—we couldn't see the lower half of his face, but his forehead knotted. "And I don't see how they could do it so completely."

"Be sure to ask later, but right now, we need to leave," I said. Breathing noxious fumes for me is about the equivalent of being near someone with a cold. Makes me feel diseased and more than a little leprous.

"As you say."

We headed back to the car, clothes over our mouths and noses. I went for the driver's seat automatically. Ian raised his eyebrows at me and reached for the keys. Right. I handed them over, retreating to the back seat. Maggie could take shotgun. Maggie was competent.

He turned the key. The engine whispered with an edge of a growl and faded to nothing. He tried again and this time there was only a faint hiss. Once more, and there was simply nothing.

Silence.

"I have never," he emphasized, "heard a car make that noise before."

"I told you we hit something," I said petulantly.

So of course we all got out to look at it, removing the material from our mouths so we could properly communicate.

"See!" I said, part triumph, part anger. The front was crumpled, exactly what you would expect from a head-on collision with a bloody devil fence. There were scratches up to the windshield, almost, paint and metal peeled back like giant claws had raked across the surface.

"No, I do not see," he said back.

I gestured at it. "You said it was 'completely unharmed', and I quote. Well, it clearly isn't."

So, so nice to have someone else in the loony bin chair.

He frowned harder than ever, staring at me as if willing my face to change. "And I stand by that. It's completely unharmed, Ash."

"Well, it's not really," Maggie admitted. "There are scratches. They're pretty deep, Ian."

"They're non-existent," he insisted, incredulous.

Maggie and I looked at each other. We had the same conversation, the same thoughts and anxieties, without a spoken word.

Well, Ash, Ian _is _the sane one.

Well, Maggie, it's not like we haven't imagined things before.

Though usually not at the same time.

We turned our heads from each other to re-assess the damage.

"It's kind of creepy when you two do that," Ian muttered through his shirt.

"Nope," Maggie said. "Still scratched."

"And _crumpled_," I said.

"Still fine..." Ian said.

"I don't see the crumple, love," Maggie said to me. "But I do acknowledge the cuts, and if it were a person they would need stitches."

"Well...I don't know what to do with that. What I see is what I see," I said, frowning myself.

"What _I _see is real," murmured Ian.

"Shut up, Ian," I said disdainfully. No one asked the sane one.

* * *

*narrows eyes and glares at the abyss* I will make that abyss my BITCH- do you hear that abyss? That is the sound of you weeping in fear. As well you should. You know how some folks say that people can glare daggers? Well, I glare ACTUAL DAGGERS. So. Yeah. Your funeral.

-Maggie Smith


End file.
